


In The Bleak Mid-Winter

by wishwellingtons



Category: Endeavour (TV), Inspector Morse & Related Fandoms
Genre: Christmas, Complete, M/M, One Shot, Oxford, semi-established relationship?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-03 02:49:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17275691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: It's winter, and Max is worrying about Morse.





	In The Bleak Mid-Winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iloveyoudie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iloveyoudie/gifts).



Being besotted with Morse had not yet lost its trepidations. 

Max had made a study of him.

It was more characteristic than Max's colleagues supposed for him to assess another human being with reference to personality and mannerisms rather than through scrutinising his tripe and toxicity. 

Certain surgical metaphors persisted of course; Max noted that Morse was keen in both senses of the word.

But science was cut down by poetry, or at least its half-sloshed recollection. Morse was a bright particular star, but no stranger to the darkness. For a young man, Morse had small opinion of the world in its kindness and possibility, and yet he persisted in being hurt and shocked by every manifestation of its dirtiness. Max had observed that for Morse, even when the sunlight caught his hair, and a warm midsummer flared his skin with freckles and blushed his paper-thin body into a sweat, the city of Oxford remained a decidedly wintery place.

Morse worried Max especially in winter. 

Morse’s colleagues were ignorantly and unhygienically given to phlegm and effusion, settling into loud nose-blowing and hacking expectorant as soon as the station windows steamed up in autumn. Amidst the dripping glass and miasma of peppermint and tincture, Morse was by contrast (and when was he anything else?) the kind of man who concealed a cold until it became bronchitis (twice), or who was discovered once, motionless, on the mortuary floor after foregoing sleep and sunlight for three consecutive December days (once; awful). 

When summoned from the warm warren of his bed to deal with a corpse in a runny field or knee-deep in the bloated iciness of the Magdalen brook, Max found himself worrying less about his own health than hoping Morse wouldn’t be the detective to receive a similar call. And it was rare, rare indeed, that Max didn’t want to see Morse in his day; rarer still when they hadn’t passed at least part of their night in the same uneven bed.

Being besotted with Morse meant that Max yearned to take care of him. He managed it, he feared, only in the most basic sense – and since Morse never talked about bed, except when he was in it, he couldn’t be quite certain. Not that either of them had the vocabulary or appetite for _that_ kind of conversation. He’d rather have his hands on Morse’s pretty throat, compressing the structures, or pinning his elegant carpal bones, than hear him appraise Max’s skills in his bedroom. 

It pained Max that he lacked the skill to rectify Morse’s living situation. Needlework on an exquisite abdomen, yes; broderie anglaise on a leaking roof, no. High-handed acerbity to the landlord would only attract suspicion coming not from the tenant (a shadow of his truculent self) but from a bachelor doctor who - Max knew - usually came across as something of a bitch. But he hated to see Morse spending the shortest, darkest days in a freezing bedsit. 

And thus, Max went to Morse (metaphorically speaking), and invited him home for Christmas (to speak literally). For the entire period of their coinciding leave. To a goose from the Covered Market, and a cheese platter from Boswell’s, and the newly-installed gas fire and a bathroom suite and warm carpets paid for with the last of dear Richard’s money: the legacy that had got DeBryn started in what he now thought of as his ‘real life’. To five or so days of good food and booze and the tragic joy Max took in seeing Morse’s arrogant, sensitive profile on the other side of his hearth. 

Of course, Max didn’t phrase it like that. Being besotted with Morse had educated Max in the imminence, immanence and inexhaustibility of Morse’s boundaries: all the ways one could hurt this beautiful, vulnerable, arrogant creature who maddened him, in bed and out.

It was in bed that Max suggested it, in that post-coital period when Max inevitably began to squirm about his stomach or what his hair might be doing. But Morse had been so desperate that evening, so chilled by the bad week and so ashamed of the deepening stain on the Aertex-clad ceiling - he’d been worrying _aloud_ about the flat even more loudly than the worries that usually remained in his head, until Max had kissed him and pinned him to the blankets. And Max couldn’t stand that. He wanted Morse sated and immobile and flushed beneath him, not fretful and simultaneously beyond reach. And thus, while the snow dropped and the damp, dark week fell to its freezing close, Max lay shivering beside Morse and Morse’s red-tipped, half-finished cigarette, and asked. Christmas. Five days. He made agitated mention of sherry.

And Morse, to Max’s besotted, agitated, heart-warmed wonder, said yes.

“What can I bring you?” Morse asked, after he’d kissed him his thanks, and Max answered truthfully, and Morse blushed to the roots of his Dionysian red-gold hair. Then Morse lay down again, and Max held him, and began, joyfully aloud, to plan his Christmas shopping list.

**Author's Note:**

> An expanded and revised version of the tiny fic written at the recipient's suggestion, just before Christmas 2018.


End file.
